For various reasons (performance, authentication, etc.) in a production environment, it’s recommended to run Galaxy behind a web server proxy. Although any proxy could work, Apache is a common choice. Alternatively, we use nginx for our public sites and open source infrastructure, and details are available for it, too.

Currently the only recommended way to run Galaxy with Apache is using mod_rewrite and mod_proxy. Either mod_proxy_uwsgi or mod_proxy_http may be used from there.

To support proxying, the mod_proxy, mod_http_proxy and mod_rewrite modules must be enabled in the Apache config. The main proxy directives, ProxyRequests and ProxyVia do not need to be enabled.

Some Galaxy URLs contain encoded slashes (%2F) in the path and Apache will not serve these URLs by default. To configure Apache to serve URLs with encoded slashes in the path, add the following line to your Apache configuration file:

AllowEncodedSlashes NoDecode

Note: The NoDecode setting was added in httpd 2.2.18, and CentOS 6 (as RHEL 6 does) only has 2.2.15. The CentOS SCLo SIG Repo has an httpd24 package.

For a default Galaxy configuration running on http://localhost:8080/, the following lines in the Apache configuration will proxy requests to the Galaxy application:

# RewriteRewriteEngineonRewriteRule ^(.*) http://localhost:8080$1 [P]

Or, if using mod_proxy with HTTP transport

ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Or, if using mod_proxy with uWSGI transport

ProxyPass / uwsgi://127.0.0.1:4001/

Thus, all requests on your server are now redirected to Galaxy. Because this example uses the “root” of your web server, you may want to use a VirtualHost to be able to run other sites from this same server.

If your Apache server is set up to use mod_security, you may need to modify the value of the SecRequestBodyLimit. The default value on some systems will limit uploads to only a few kilobytes.

Since Apache is more efficient at serving static content, it is best to serve it directly, reducing the load on the Galaxy process and allowing for more effective compression (if enabled), caching, and pipelining. To do so, your configuration will now include the following, where $GALAXY_ROOT should be replaced with the filesystem path to your Galaxy installation

It may be necessary to house Galaxy at an address other than the web server root (http://www.example.org/galaxy), instead of http://www.example.org). To do this, you need to make the following changes:

Two changes are necessary:

In the apache config, prefix all of the location directives with your prefix, like so:

The Galaxy application needs to be aware that it is running with a prefix (for generating URLs in dynamic pages). This is accomplished by configuring a Paste proxy-prefix filter in the [app:main] section of config/galaxy.ini and restarting Galaxy:

If you place Galaxy behind a proxy address that uses SSL (i.e., https:// URLs), edit your galaxy location block (e.g. location/ when served at the root, or something else like location/galaxy when served under a prefix)

Setting X-URL-SCHEME makes Galaxy aware of what type of URL it should generate for external sites like Biomart. This should be added to the existing <Location/> block if you already have one, and adjusted accordingly if you’re serving Galaxy from a subdirectory.

All of Galaxy’s static content can be cached on the client side, and everything (including dynamic content) can be compressed on the fly. This will decrease download and page load times for your clients, as well as decrease server load and bandwidth usage. To enable, you’ll need to load mod_deflate and mod_expires in your Apache configuration, and then set:

Galaxy sends files (e.g. dataset downloads) by opening the file and streaming it in chunks through the proxy server. However, this ties up the Galaxy process, which can impact the performance of other operations (see production configuration for a more in-depth explanation).

Apache can assume this task instead and as an added benefit, speed up downloads. This is accomplished through the use of mod_xsendfile, a 3rd-party Apache module. Dataset security is maintained in this configuration because Apache will still check with Galaxy to ensure that the requesting user has permission to access the dataset before sending it.

To enable it, you must first install mod_xsendfile, this is usually available via your OS’s repositories. Once done, add the appropriate LoadModule directive to your Apache configuration to load the xsendfile module and the XSendFile directives to your proxy configuration:

<Location"/">XSendFileonXSendFilePath /
</Location>

Finally edit your $GALAXY_ROOT/config/galaxy.ini and make the following change before restarting Galaxy:

[app:main]apache_xsendfile=True

For this to work, the user under which your nginx server runs will need read access to Galaxy’s $GALAXY_ROOT/database/files/ directory and its contents.

Display sites such as UCSC work not by sending data directly from Galaxy to UCSC via the client’s browser, but by sending UCSC a URL to the data in Galaxy that the UCSC server will retrieve data from. Since enabling authentication will place all of Galaxy behind authentication, such display sites will no longer be able to access data via that URL. If display_servers is set to a non-empty value in $GALAXY_ROOT/config/galaxy.ini, this tells Galaxy it should allow the named servers access to data in Galaxy. However, you still need to configure Apache to allow access to the datasets. An example config is provided here that allows the UCSC Main/Test backends:

<Location"/root/display_as">SatisfyAnyOrder deny,allow
Deny from allAllow from hgw1.cse.ucsc.edu
Allow from hgw2.cse.ucsc.edu
Allow from hgw3.cse.ucsc.edu
Allow from hgw4.cse.ucsc.edu
Allow from hgw5.cse.ucsc.edu
Allow from hgw6.cse.ucsc.edu
Allow from hgw7.cse.ucsc.edu
Allow from hgw8.cse.ucsc.edu
</Location>

PLEASE NOTE that this introduces a security hole , the impact of which depends on whether you have restricted access to the dataset via Galaxy’s internal dataset permissions.

By default, data in Galaxy is public. Normally with a Galaxy server behind authentication in a proxy server this is of little concern since only clients who’ve authenticated can access Galaxy. However, if display site exceptions are made as shown above, anyone could use those public sites to bypass authentication and view any public dataset on your Galaxy server. If you have not changed from the default and most of your datasets are public, you should consider running your own display sites that are also behind authentication rather than using the public ones.

For datasets for which access has been restricted to one or more roles (i.e. it is no longer “public”), access for reading via external browsers is only allowed for a brief period, when someone with access permission clicks the “display at…” link. During this period, anyone who has the dataset ID would then be able to use the browser to view this dataset. Although such a scenario is unlikely, it is technically possible.

If you’ve configured multiple threads for galaxy in the config/galaxy.ini file, you will need a ProxyBalancer to manage sending requests to each of the threads. You can do that with apache configuration as follows: